Friday, December 20, 2013

A recent conversation on a blog I frequent had me reminiscing
back on a morning a few years ago when I was listening to my favorite Monday
afternoon radio show. It was a political
show that analyzed my state’s politics from a Christian perspective. I enjoyed it because each week they had guests
who were state senators, city councilman, school superintendents, or other governmental
representatives. Some were more versed
in politics, others Christianity, some were strong in both, but all were trying
their best to tell the public what they did and why they did it.

That day the discussion centered-around the state’s cuts in
education. One of the key issues was the
300+ teachers who had just lost their jobs due to budget cuts. Since our representatives didn’t want to increase
revenue (read: raise taxes) to help the state’s financial crunch, the only
option was to cut spending. And since
there is only so much money you can save in education by eliminating rulers,
basketballs, tampon dispensers, and school buildings, salaries were cut. Ironically though, while listening to my
favorite morning news radio show earlier that same day, I heard state
politicians complaining that Obama’s/Democratic economic policies weren’t
working because our state lost several hundred jobs the previous week. Why is this ironic? Because the politicians who were complaining
about losing jobs based on Democratic policies were the Republicans who cut
teachers’ jobs with their most recent legislation, and those were the several
hundred jobs that were lost.

Having listened to many of those folks give sound bites
speeches, I know they aren’t rocket scientists… and they probably would have
trouble following an episode of Pinky and The Brain involving building a rocket
with kitchen utensils. Still, they were far
from stupid. Actually, their plan was pretty
smart. It’s like a crook stealing money
from the police station and then donating the money to PAL for a tax write off. You make your enemy look bad and you profit
from it financially, and while the original action is immoral/illegal, your
profit from it is perfectly legal.

But why would they do it?
How does destroying public education benefit anyone, and why would any
politician want to do it? I say two
reasons: 1) to control who gets into education and what they get out of it, and
2) because the educational process is a service; and the sale of any service is
profitable.

For #1, who gets into education and what they get out of it directly
impacts the ability of the rich to stay rich. Prior to falling into the recent
period of double digit unemployment, the percentage of millionaires was
increasing by double digits annually.
Now I’m not talking about silver spoon millionaires that inherited tens
of millions of dollars, I mean self-made millionaires that fought, clawed,
saved, invented, reinvested, and sold their way into the lowest level of
millionaire-dom. They exemplified the
American Dream. Their money was not
based on market speculation, but on customers.
They were not heavily subsidized by the government; they earned their
money by offering products that people wanted.
But with more and more money being sucked up by the growing upper
middle-class and new rich folks, there was also an increased demand for a say
in what goes on in local and state governments by those same people. This, of course, cut into old money’s ability to control the
environment. Hey, if everyone can get an
education and get rich, being rich doesn’t make you special anymore. Then you
don’t get to make the decision on what areas are built up or torn down, where
your population of workers will live, and what other choices they have for
employment other than you. So what do
you do to maintain power? You cut down
on the number of new rich folks fighting you for money and power. Of course the rich can’t attack the
Capitalist system that enabled them to get rich, so the logical thing is to cut
off the tools needed to be successful in the Capitalist system… the primary
long-term asset being education (the primary short-term asset is customers,
which is why I believe this recession was planned… but that is a blog for
another day).

In the case of corporations, control equates to control of
the means of production… i.e., low-wage workers. As the old song said, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down
on the farm after they’ve seen Paree (Paris).”
Once you’ve educated the people of an agricultural or manufacturing community,
or of any poor community, whether urban, suburban, or rural, they naturally
seek the potential quality of life improvements that education makes
available. This is why so many of those
communities have suffered massive “brain drain” over the past few decades. The best and the brightest go away to
college, but never come home again. When
the “C” students are your brightest workers, production issues will
follow. Just imagine what would happen
if our country was run by a “C” student (Oh yeah… been there, done that). So limiting A and B students to a C level
education keeps smart folks at home and available for future exploitation. It’s cruel, but it makes dollars so it makes
sense.

Now as I said, the #2 reason to destroy public education is
the fact that the educational process is a service, and the sale of any service
is profitable. In the not so good old
days, there really was no Middle Class. While
there were a few people who “made a good living”, generally there were rich
folks and poor folks. Since you had to
pay for education, rich folks were educated and poor folks weren’t. Having control of information, rich folks controlled
the poor folk. So generation after
generation the rich folks stayed rich unless some poor folks had some luck
added to their hard work, or they did something like build a better mouse trap,
Pocket Fisherman, or Tae Bo tape.

Then the new old good old days came, and they brought public
education with it. The industrial
revolution’s assembly line labor system made people that were able to read at a
basic level important for increased productivity. Putting kids together in a building where
they practiced a certain skill for a short period of time, then at the ringing
of a bell moved them to another skill for a short period of time, was perfect
training for work in a factory. They
even gave them the summer off for the benefit of those who needed to focus on helping
out with the family farm. And 150+ years
later we still have the same system… except now some schools use buzzers
instead of bells (gotta love technology).

So for the last 150+ years, more and more government money
has been funneled into education so that our citizens can get it for free. Since *equal* education is the ultimate
equalizer for a country that prides itself on equal opportunity, it was a
necessary expense. But as with anything
else, if the government is funding something, then private business can’t make
much money from it. In the past, when
public education was utilized solely by those who couldn’t afford private
education, this was not an issue. But
now there is a viable middle class, many of whom could pay for private
education but choose to utilize public education because cost-wise to the
family finances it makes sense. But what
would happen if public education became so qualitatively poor that it lost its
overall value. The middle class would
opt for private/charter schools. This
idea was floated during the original Bush II years through the concept of
school vouchers, but it didn’t get too far.
The middle class did it’s cost-benefit analysis, and the difference in
educational quality between public and private school in many areas was so
close that the absolute value of the vouchers couldn’t surpass the comparative
value of a free education (don’t tell me I didn’t learn anything in Economics
201). But if we continue to make cuts in
education that increase classroom size, reduce educational supplies and
co-curricular experiences, and chase good teachers into the private sector for
higher pay and more security, then the middle class en masse will be willing to
revisit pay/voucher education as a viable alternative. Putting the squeeze on the middle class may
be cruel, but if it makes dollars, it makes sense.

(I feel a Jesse Jackson moment coming on) So in
an effort to avoid anything that could be deemed socialized, teachers’ unions,
free pre-school and subsidized college have been demonized, with the goal of
making education privatized.
Understanding that a loss of basic education will leave our populace
demoralize, we must understand that those who aree being most vilified and scrutinized,
are fighting to hold onto educational policies that are more humanized. Thus, we must make sure that our use of the
ballot is maximized so that growing citizens over growing currency is
prioritized, until a time when equal education for all citizens is
realized. Until then… keep hope alive!!! Word!!

Being only three generations away from it being illegal for me
to learn how to read, I understand the power of education to get us from where
we were to where we are, and from where we are to where we want to be. Mitt Romney said that corporations are people. If education were totally privatized, those
“people” would control the economic and informational wealth of our
country. Slave masters were people too,
and they controlled the economic and informational wealth of their time and
place. I’ve heard too many family
stories about the bad old good old days to ever take education for granted, and
way too many to let anyone take it away.
What about you?

Let me end by saying this is not an anti-Republican or
anti-capitalism post, it is a pro-education post. I understand that there are Republicans and Democrats
are pro and anti-public education, and Green Party, Libertarians, and other
factions that have unique answers that don’t get any attention. I don’t know all the answers, but I do have a
basic understanding of what we should be doing.
And I do know that privatizing education in a global economy is
absolutely not the answer, despite the economic benefit of destroying public
education.